With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
Teachers at schools with large culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) student populations have found that parents’ expectations of their children reflect their socio-economic backgrounds and education levels rather than their cultures.
TEACHER: I’ve talked to some of the girls whose parents are from the city and they’re very, very motivated. But some of the girls whose parents are from the back blocks of Lebanon, they’re like “we’re raising you to be a mother”. That’s what matters.
TEACHER: I remember coming back from leave and three of my students had been married off. They’d left school.
TEACHER: There are some parents that will take them back to Turkey or back to Iraq at the beginning of second term and they’ll be gone for second term, third term, then the family will come back in fourth term and say “why isn’t my kid passing?”
TEACHER: The parents of one of the top students this year were from the city and they’re pushing, pushing, pushing for her to go to university and there are other kids, like a Year 9 girl who’s engaged and her parents are from the country. Just totally different expectations based on their family and where their families are from.
Teacher Snapshot 2
TEACHER: These parents can say on one hand, I want him to be a doctor, but know that he’s only got Cs, but they still keep saying I want him to be a doctor, and we’ve got the magic to make that happen. So there’s a big gap in the expectation of the kid and what the kid’s going to be able to do… But it’s also that blind faith that I will sit in this class and I will gradually be painted over with a different…it’s like the information will wash over me and I will walk out of that door different. They will make me into this. Not that I have to go home and work at home to make myself into this.
Teacher Snapshot 3
TEACHER: See the thing is too, that they would not miss school in Iraq and they wouldn’t miss school in Turkey. So why is it that they feel that they can miss school here? And my question then would be, where’s the misunderstanding of the value that we have of education? … Without putting too hard a line on it, what we’re actually doing is we’re feeding into the disenfranchising and feeding into their anxiety so that they can operate outside. It’s passive support… when I’ve been in Turkey they say “your government pays for everything and I know that if I go to your country they’ll pay me not to work.” So I can come to Australia and I don’t have to work and I don’t have to go to school. What I can do is, I can go a couple of times just to get myself on a register somewhere and they’ll pay me. Austudy’s great isn’t it? Austudy’s real good because it means that I can have a part-time job as well with my family and I can get my parents to write me a note in Turkish or Arabic which I know you can’t read, so we’ve got a note on file. Do we have a translator? Yes, no, maybe. But we’ve got a note and a note’s enough isn’t it?